Ben Kanter @beneuroscience@qoto.org

Academics who are on GitHub, consider upvoting this excellent suggestion from @Edent (see link below).

The suggestion is to change the code used by ORCID's website to allow Mastodon verification links to be found. This would allow Mastodon users with an ORCID page to verify that they are the author of the publications listed on their ORCID page.

https://github.com/ORCID/ORCID-Source/issues/6668

#SciComm

Here is a carrot wasp, Gasteruption sp., seen this past July 2022 in Cambridge, UK. The adults drink nectar from flowers of the carrot family–hence the name–and contribute to pollinating them.

Its larval progeny develops as an unwelcomed boarder–a #parasite, really, even a predator–in the nest cells of native bees and wasp larvae, consuming the food intended for the host, and likely have started #hibernation by now. Will only pupate into next Spring.
#wasplove #entomology #iNaturalist
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/125443949

Ambio

Nature, smells, and human wellbeing

(HT @BenjaminDYoung)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-022-01760-w

In case someone didn't know, two books I've co-authored are freely available online for non-commercial use:

#Bayesian Data Analysis, 3rd ed (aka BDA3) at https://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/ and lectures plus #rstats, #Python and #Stan code at https://avehtari.github.io/BDA_course_Aalto/

#Regression and Other Stories at https://avehtari.github.io/ROS-Examples/ including #rstats and #Stan code

The web sites also have links to the publishers' web stores if you prefer hard copies of these

Finally finding time for my Mastodon #introduction!

I am a Senior Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest in Toronto, Canada. I am also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto.

My research uses multimodal neuroimaging techniques to study cognitive aging, with a special focus on memory and the functional organization of the medial temporal lobes.

Read more here: https://www.olsenmemorylab.com/

If you're interested in how our capacity to #transfer #knowledge relates to why we suck at #multitasking, then check out this review I wrote with the mastodonless Paul Dux. It's hot off the press today!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00653-x

@neuro
@cognition

Let me highlight a recent toolbox the brilliant @sandervanbree has written with other brilliant tootless (not toothless) people, which allows you to realign the time axis of your ephys experiments from clock time (msec) to brain time #oscillations, aptly called the BrainTimeToolbox. Stand-alone though hopefully to be implemented in #fieldtrip eventually.

https://github.com/sandervanbree/braintime

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01386-8

Trying things out. I will be posting mainly #neuroscience. So here is a question. What is the most important thing we need to be able to do to understand the principles on which brains work?

Every Mastodon explanation is like "It's very simple, your account is part of a kerflunk, and each kerflunk can talk to each other as part of a bumblurt. At the moment everyone you flurgle can see your bloops but only people IN your kerflunk can quark your nerps. Kinda like email."

More plotting of flies! I call this one "Fruit fly snow angel"

@albertcardona @SussilloDavid @dickretired I partially agree. Without the connectome you will need to make some assumptions, but I think the advancements in understanding that could be possible with fine-grained perturbations sans connectome would be still quite large.

@dickretired Perturb brains circuits in the way that test state-space concepts of neural activity. E.g. stimulate on particular vectors to, e.g., move along a putative line attractor.

@SussilloDavid @dickretired I second this take from David. I would add, we need this for testing learning algorithms as well, bc we really need to be able to set specific activitystates to see how this induces changes downstream.

I see that people are very politely introducing themselves again now that things have really got going here.

For those I haven't met yet, I'm a cognitive neuroscientist interested in the brain mechanisms of human memory.

My university leadership role involves efforts to enhance interdisciplinary research and to improve the culture we work in, such as increasing diversity in leadership, empowering ECRs and professional services staff, and incentivising open research practices.

#introduction

A quick #introduction by way of a recent paper: hippocampal-centric models of episodic memory are incomplete.

Here's why/our fix:

The anterior thalamic nuclei: core components of a tripartite episodic memory system

Aggleton & O’Mara
Nature Rev Neurosci (2022)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00591-8

#memory #brain #anteriorthalamus #korsakoff #tripartite #episodic #memorysystem

#introduction

I am a researcher at #Mila, the Québec AI institute, and a prof at #McGill University.

My research sits at the intersection of #AI and #neuroscience, with a focus on #learning and #memory.

Most centrally, I'm interested in credit assignment in both space and time, and universal principles of learning related to those questions.

#introduction

I am a PhD student @SaxeLab at the University of Oxford studying how brains can preserve previously acquired knowledge during learning.

My research aims at developing mathematical tools and using simulation studies to understand algorithms that describe and analyse learning in the brain. In particular, I am interested in the learning dynamics of gradient-based algorithms and how they apply to learning in biological organisms.

#introduction I am a professor at Penn and also co-director of the CIFAR Learning in Machines and Brains program. I like to think about neuroscience, AI, and science in general. Neuromatch. Recently, much of my thinking is about Rigor in science and I just started leading a large NIH funded initiative community for rigor (C4R) that aims at teaching scientific rigor.

My interests are broad: Causality, ANNs, Logic of Neuroscience, Neurotech, Data analysis, AI, community, science of science